Atlassian’s Bamboo 5 Bridges the DevOps Gap

Atlassian is releasing a significant upgrade to its Bamboo continuous integration (CI) server, one that represents an expansion of the tool's core capabilities. The company is billing Bamboo 5, which becomes generally available on July 9, as the first tool of its kind "to connect the process of preparing and testing software with the process of releasing it."

With Bamboo 5, the company seeks to accomplish once and for all the core goal of the DevOps movement, explained Sarah Goff-Dupont, Atlassian's marketing manager for Bamboo. This is to break down the old silos between product and operations groups, and to get those groups working together as a unit.

"We're trying to cross pollinate the information that has traditionally been within one realm or the other and bring it all together so that these silos have better communication with each other," said Goff-Dupont. "With Bamboo 5 we set out to give deployments and release management first class treatment within the continuous integration and continuous delivery tool space. It's really the only true continuous delivery tool on the market."

Bamboo 5 fills in the missing piece in the DevOps puzzle, which Goff-Dupont says is the lack of traceability between build and deployment processes, and the lack of visibility into the release-preparation process. Bamboo 5 provides "continuity in tracking changes from idea and implementation to delivery, enabling development teams and IT organizations to work better together with more coordination, efficiency and visibility around the process of releasing software," the company says.

The new deployment features are designed to enhance the tool's ability to deploy development and QA environments and speed up the feedback cycle. The product combines this capability with a custom JIRA workflow and Kanban boards, which allows QA to perform drag-and-drop deployments to their target environments. All of which supports the agile process, said Goff-Dupont.

"The truth is, there is no such thing as a 'DevOps' tool," she said. "I don't care what anyone else says. Adopting this tool or that tool doesn't make you a DevOps team. It's how you collaborate internally, and how you bring your teams together across groups. With Bamboo 5, we put development-centric information side-by-side with deployment tooling, and exposed ops-centric information inside JIRA. The result is a tool that facilitates that process."

The Australian collaboration and development toolmaker is probably best known for its JIRA bug tracker and its Confluence collaboration tool. The company also makes Stash, an on-premise distributed version control systems (DVCSs) for enterprise teams, and Bitbucket, a cloud-based DVCS hosting service. The company released to beta a new version of its SourceTree desktop client for the Git and Mercurial DVCSs in March, and launched a set of page-creation templates called "Blueprints" in April.

Atlassian purchased Bamboo from Pols Consulting in 2006. (The product was called "Beetlejuice" at the time.) The product's current customer list includes NASA, EMC, Verizon, and Mercedes.

Bamboo 5 has been in beta since early May. The program drew nearly 170 participants. A full-featured trial version is available now here.